GemFire PDX Serialization
GemFire's Portable Data eXchange (PDX) is a cross-language data format that can reduce the cost of distributing and serializing your objects. PDX stores data in named fields that you can access individually, to avoid the cost of deserializing the entire data object. PDX also allows you to mix versions of objects where you have added or removed fields.

Standard Java Serialization
You can use standard Java serialization for data you only distribute between Java applications. If you distribute your data between non-Java clients and Java servers, you need to do additional programming to get the data between the various class formats.